Thanks for your detailed response. You raise a lot of interesting ideas and I don't know if I've got answers to all of them, but this is what I think anyway (and this is very off the cuff)...
I think what you're essentially asking is: how does creativity manifest itself in a country, and how can it foster economic development?
I think there are creative people in every country, but for creativity to flourish, it needs the right circumstances. When you look at the Lost Generation of writers, they all seemed to produce their best work in post-WWI Paris partly because the cost of living there was much more affordable than in, say, New York. And then you've someone like James Joyce who probably wouldn't have written Ulysses had he not left Ireland for continental Europe. I think the combination of cultural resources (like the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève where Joyce studied) and low living costs enabled a lot of writers and artists to produce their best work. Had Joyce remained in Ireland, he simply wouldn't have had the same opportunities; whereas if Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald had stayed in the US, they would have struggled to get by.
France is a bit of a paradox for me because on one hand it's produced so many creative things, but on the other hand it can be quite rigid. I've spent a brief amount of time in high school and university here and I find the teaching style much more rigid than in other countries. There's almost always a 'correct' answer and if you don't provide it, a teacher would give you a bad grade. So students often seem to be lacking in confidence and afraid of speaking up in class, lest they say the wrong thing and get derided by their teacher in front of the whole class.
At the same time, this insistence on precision can be really good for things like craft. I find the standard of craft for art much higher than in New Zealand.
I don't think I agree with your view that a country like Brazil could flourish if it shackled off its rigidity and embraced a more chaotic form of improvisation. I think that for creativity to succeed in the long term, you actually need a sense of order to ensure that the creativity can be honed effectively. If you look at ad agencies, they're actually very hierarchical. And strangely enough, I think that's a good thing. You kind of need one leader to have a clear vision of what they want because if you have no leadership, everyone would just end up fighting and nothing would ever get done — or conversely, there'll be so much political infighting that whatever they produce would end up looking like a complete mess. So while I think creativity and improvisation are great, they need to be tamed to an extent. Otherwise everything would just be pure chaos, and chaos really isn't a great recipe for long-term sustainable success. If you look at football/soccer, the most successful teams are a blend of creativity and discipline. Teams that are pure creativity and improvisation can play well for a short while, but they then they eventually self-combust, whereas teams with zero creativity that sit back and defend almost never win. However, teams that can create opportunities but still work together as a unit are the ones that can sustain success for a number of years, because they can both attack and defend to a high level.
On the other hand, if countries are too rigid and authoritarian, they can stifle creativity to an enormous extent. I think this is a problem everywhere, and governments should loosen up, but that's easier said than done...
So I guess that while France has a rigid bureaucracy and a relative aversion to novel ideas, they also have a strong education system and a high respect for culture (to the extent that they spend billions on cultural productions every year) that enable people to produce new things.
Funnily enough, I was actually taught by a leftist French professor who took part in the Mai 1968 student protests. I also had a lecturer whose supervisor was Jacques Derrida. So I'd say that in intellectual circles, there's still definitely an interest in quite radical ideas. But at the time, I'd say that most people are fairly conservative and while they might not like the government (they never seem tp like the government), they wouldn't want society to change radically.
These are just my thoughts anyway. I'm probably wrong about most of them :)
